The Xbox had a handful of Rally games, but in all honesty the only memorable one is RalliSport Challenge 2. Featuring amazing graphics, great damage modeling, loads of tracks, plenty of cars and fun online play Rallisport 2 was a great game that all who played remember fondly and a worthy successor has been an obvious visible hole in the Xbox 360 game library.

Codemasters hope to fill this void in our lives with Colin McRae DiRT, the first rally racing game to hit the Xbox 360 running on their ultra brand new game engine, NEON. The claims by the team were pretty huge, NEON would accurately model the games locations, provide advanced physics and give us extreme amounts of car damage if we'd be unlucky enough to slam into a tree, brick wall or roll our ride straight off the road.

It's obvious that the time spent developing it was well spent indeed because DiRT is easily one of the best looking driving games on the Xbox 360 to date. I say ‘one of the best' because it has no real direct competition. If you love rally racing, then DiRT is your only option so far but thankfully it's an absolute amazing looking game with a lengthy single player career that kept me hooked. Yes I cover myself there by specifically mentioning ‘Single Player Career' because the multiplayer is almost not worth mentioning, but more on that later.

The first thing, even before the in-game graphics, that grabs you is just how polished and amazing everything looks. The menus themselves would have to be the simplest to use, and best looking system that I've seen in a racing game in years. DiRT is an all round professional job from head to toe and a real showcase for those still looking to justify their ‘next-gen' indulgence or perhaps looking for a game that isn't a shooter to show just how far games have come in the past few years. Is DiRT the ‘Gears of War' of racing games? Pretty much yeah. Sure, there's a few flaws but when it's all in motion it's easily the best looking rally game seen on any console to date.

I know I've obviously taking a liking to the graphics and thankfully DiRT isn't light on content. There are over 40 cars, many with multiple paint jobs, covering 12 different vehicle classes. There's front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, four wheel drive, CORR buggies, rally raid through to actual big rig trucks. That's right, not just those Paris Dakar style off road trucks, but actual semi truck cabs all juiced up for those tough hill climb events. There's plenty of locations from all around the world and it all comes together in a realistic looking and fun game that's hard to put down thanks to the high level of variety on offer between the different vehicle types, and the many locations.

The career mode is presented in a tiered format that sees you trying your hardest to win each event to unlock more races, which offer more prize money, which lets you purchase faster cars to compete in the increasingly difficult events that you unlock. There are 11 tiers in total comprising of 66 events, but as you progress many of these events contain multiple stages to beat. The event types are broken up quite nicely between all the different car classes which help to negate any repetitiveness that can sometimes sink in. The locations are quite varied and you'll be racing in the USA, Italy, England, France, Japan, Spain, Germany and Australia and while unfortunately there's no random or changing weather, you'll encounter the occasional wet track.

The lack of weather isn't a killer because hurtling through the forest of England at 150kph plus in DiRT is pretty damn exciting as it is, but doing that through a rain storm would have really upped the immersion factor even further. No doubt this is to ensure the frame rate stays as high as possible because there's a distinct lack of particle effects in the dry weather also. If you've watched even 5 seconds of rally footage on television then you'll know that dust spews out from all 4 wheels in a trail sometimes hundreds of meters long behind the cars, sadly in DiRT the dust trail disappears about 20 feet or so behind the car and there isn't any mud splattering to be found either. This is a let down, especially because DiRT features some damn impressive in-car views with a windscreen just begging for mud to be thrown up on it obscuring your view.

The regular rally style events put you up against the clock finding that balance between top speed and control while you snake your way through fantastic looking levels, across gravel and tarmac in the countries mentioned earlier. The buggy and rally raid events feature dirt and desert tracks filled with plenty of jumps and corners to slide around and the newest addition to this series are regular multi car racing events. Featuring 10 cars at the same time on the same track, the multi car events have more in common with regular ‘touring car' style events, except everyone is obviously in rally cars. These generally take the form of a mad dash to that first corner where everyone then progresses to smash into each other and whoever is left intact fights it out to the end. They're pretty hectic events and the track is quickly littered with broken car parts and unfortunately during these events the frame rate can sometimes take a bit of a dive.

If there's one part of DiRT that overshadows the excellent looking scenery it has to be the car damage. As mentioned, especially in the multi-car events, as in real life, cars smashing into each other usually leave debris and there's no shortage of it here. Unfortunately destroying your car means you have to try that race again but it just looks so cool that you usually won't mind. Individual pieces of the car get torn off, windscreens shatter, wheels can get snapped off and the damage affects the way that the car handles. The damage system in DiRT would rate as one of the best that I've seen and even manages to offer up more eye candy than PGR 3 and yes, even Forza 2. It's that good but you definitely pay for it during the multi stage events where you're given limited time to make repairs between each stage.

While DiRT has this amazing damage system (that I'll probably get flamed for comparing to Forza 2) the handling in the game can best be described as ‘arcadey'. There's no real feeling of any weight to the cars and they generally all feel the same. The cars all feature very sensitive steering and I found it hard to get any long powerslides happening, even on the gravel parts of the rally tracks. The buggies slide around a bit more which felt a bit more natural but the absent feeling of weight was still noticeable. DiRT is loads of fun but this was disappointing because I was expecting something a little bit more ‘simulation' and I did find it hard to throw the tail of the car around as much as I would have liked to.

The audio in DiRT is pretty impressive featuring some great music tracks between events. The cars themselves pop and splutter in a realistic fashion and American moto cross and rally racer champ Travis Pastrana chips in to explain all the game modes and even offer some encouragement during events. Pastrana is used extremely well in the game and not just used as a drawcard to lure in fans.

If there's one area though that let me down more than the lack of weight in the handling it has to be DiRT's multiplayer modes, or rather lack of them. All that's available are two modes, rally race or hill climb and you never actually race against your opponents at the same time. When you create a multiplayer game you can't even set the options such as which track you want to race on, which I guess doesn't matter because people searching for games can't filter them by event type, track or any other variables anyway. Seeing as DiRT features a brand new multi car event during the career it's amazing to see that you can't even take that game mode online. With the cheapest and nastiest racing games generally offering some online competitive modes it's extremely disappointing to see how few and limiting the options included in DiRT are.